Real Fear for Safe Experience

On the 30th anniversary of the death of Ana Mendieta, I decided to take a retroactive look at one of her most shocking and poignant works – People Looking At Blood (1973).

Perhaps a precursor to the (now-waning) Shock Art phenomenon of the nineties, Mendieta is undoubtedly a cult hero, and an inspiration to many. Tragically, Mendieta died in September 1985, the aftermath of which echoes one of her most shocking works - People Looking At Blood.

Whilst at home in her thirty-fourth floor apartment with her artist-husband Carl Andre, an argument was heard by the neighbors and Ana ‘went out the window” (Andre’s description). Accident, suicide, or murder, this form of death is eerily similar to what appears to have happened in People Looking At Blood, an artwork she created twelve years before.

The work is, as its name would suggest, a series of photographs of unwitting members of the public walking past a pile of blood and innards on a New York City sidewalk. The people in the photographs do not know that they are part of an artwork, and they do not know that the blood is from an animal. The fear they experience is very real, and their reactions are honest.

Mendieta often worked with feminist themes in her work, and for that reason her use of blood can’t be ignored. Rape and murder scenes are things that she often recreated, heavy with blood and gore, and often using her own body. These works force themselves upon the viewer, often unsuspecting, in a bold and aggressive way often utilized by feminist artists.

(For simplicity from this point on I will use 'Subject' to describe the people depicted in the photographs, and 'Viewer' to describe the museumgoer viewing the photographs)

When looking at the photographs that make up the work People Looking At Blood, one cannot help but feel empathetic towards the subjects depicted in the images. Going about their daily lives they were unprepared to deal with such trauma. Who knows how such scenes will affect these people? Perhaps one of them witnessed a bloody murder and this will bring them back to that traumatic day. Whatever the subjects of these artworks felt at the time, we will perhaps never understand, the extent of which could quite literally be catastrophic.

People go out of their way to experience art in order to feel heightened emotions in a safe environment.   Art that is shocking or promotes fear creates adrenaline that in the non-threatening environment of a gallery can be enjoyed without worry of actual threat. Theme parks are a popular attraction for much the same reason; people enjoy feeling fear when they are confident that they are not facing actual physical trauma. The people in these photographs however, aren’t looking at an artwork; rather they are forced to become a part of one. The photographs are then displayed in the safe gallery environment for a complicit viewer. Real fear is created in the people looking at the blood in order that their real reaction can be enjoyed by the viewer in the form of a safe experience.

People Looking At Blood goes one step further than just making the work exist in a real (non-depicted) way, as it forces people to become a part of the work. It brings the work out of the art setting entirely and places upon unsuspecting victims. When creating work in this way one is playing with real emptions and fears, and one must be very careful. When entering an art gallery one already has a set of intentional and unintentional ideas and preconceptions of what to expect, and therefore how to act. The viewer is a willing participant, and is on his guard.

Oscar Wilde expressed this notion perfectly in The Critic As Artist:

 “..art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotion that it is the function of art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter.”

This artwork however, is somewhat different. The viewer has consented to view artwork, which is a decision refused the subjects. They are free to weep real tears, and their emotions will be anything but sterile.

Once art moves out of the gallery and is thrust upon the unsuspecting public (as in this work) the adrenaline cannot be enjoyed by the participant in the artwork in the same way. They are not in the safe gallery environment and are therefor facing (in their eyes) a very real threat. Real fear is created in these unwitting participants so that the gallery visitors, at the subject’s expense, can experience ‘safe fear’.

Another brilliant example of this, but in a more exaggerated and threatening way, is Chris Burden’s TV Hijack (1972). Created on a live television broadcast on which Burden was asked to create a live work, Burden held a knife to the presenter’s throat and threatened to kill her. The ethics of these are questionable, but the artworks wouldn’t be successful if this weren’t so. For these artists to create these works without the forced participation of uninformed people the works would not be as powerful or as challenging.

One can’t help but wonder; what did the people do immediately after the photographs were taken? Were they informed of the origin of the blood or the reason for its placement on the sidewalk?

This kind of work exists because people demand to be shocked in the most vicious way possible. What was deemed shocking 100 years ago is tame and tepid by today’s standards. Once the bar has been raised in terms of shock-value, anything that falls below it is then made less shocking by its comparison.

The horror of Goya has moved from the two-dimensional depicted world (i.e. painting) into the real, tangible world of Mendieta. Depictions of horror can never be as powerful as real and unexpected horror encountered in the real world. Although this blood was from an animal and was placed intentionally upon the sidewalk, the people photographed knew none of this. For them the horror was real. Mendieta successfully created real horror without having to commit a particularly horrific act. In this case, the carefully constructed instance of artificial horror, presented in this way, creates real and recognizable horror.

Artists when creating artworks are essentially intending to create a real emotion in the viewer with their work. Fear, Disgust, and Revulsion are relatively simple emotions to convey as there are many images and scenarios that when viewed will create such emotions with little effort from the artist. The Young British Artists utilized this technique to great effect and gained themselves many tabloid inches as a result. These works were successful in creating these intended emotions, but in a looser and more diluted way than achieved by Mendieta in the subjects of her photographs. People viewing these works are aware that they are viewing an artwork and not the real thing. These artworks are merely representations of horrific things, as opposed to actual horrific things, and for that reason cannot create pure emotions devoid of a level of understanding about the artwork that alters its effect.

Perhaps the most shocking and disturbing artwork to date is Zhu Yu’s ‘Eating People’ (2000), in which the artist is shown in a series of photographs cooking and eating a stillborn human foetus. The work is obviously and understandably shocking, but it lacks the delicate balance between the real and artificial present in much of Mendieta’s work. Eating People is a very extreme example of an artist deciding to create the most controversial work possible, with no other intended function other than to shock. And it is for this reason that the artwork fails to be interesting, or successful as a work of art.

This work also begs the question, ‘Where can we go now from here?’, as any artist that wants to take the ‘most shocking artwork’ mantle from Zhu is going to have to commit some pretty heinous crimes. Something expertly mocked in the satirical essay ‘On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts’ by Thomas De Quincey.

In her work, Mendieta hasn’t resorted to using real human blood; her artwork is more intelligent in its approach. She has managed to create real, honest and drastic emotion, without having to resort to using drastic measures. For this reason Mendieta’s work is most powerful in its subtlety.

Mendieta’s work is as important today as it was when she died thirty years ago, she aggressively forces us to view uncomfortable images, and her poignant message is delivered unapologetically. Today too many artists are simply looking to shock the viewer, and in this they are taking the easy way out, avoiding having the laborious task of creating works with meaning.

Ana Mendieta may have helped to pave the way for the shock artists of today, but it is doubtful that she would approve of some of their lazy tactics and essentially vapid works.

Works that exist only to shock are simply not enough, and will not prove to have the longevity that Mendieta’s work undoubtedly will.

A preview of Judy Chicago's Star Cunts & Other Attractions

Image credit - Judy Chicago at work in her china-painting studio in 1974. Courtesy of Through the Flower Archives

By Suzanna Swanson - Johnston

From 14th September - 31st December 2015, the Riflemaker Gallery will play host to Judy Chicago once again with work both acquainted and un-introduced. Meet her Star Cunts & other attractions; a feminist-fired suite of her historic sculptures, paintings and archival pieces.

Artist, writer, educator, pioneer and artistic-punk-rocker, Judy Chicago created the feminist art movement; reacting to to social and political injustice during the revolutionary times of the 1960s and 1970s that she rose to prominence in. The history of art was the history of the white bourgeois man, till it was remoulded in the hands of Judy Chicago. Her art is dry-witted, dirty-talking, socially-pointed, intricate, fecund, frank, kick-ass-colourist abstraction. It dresses up in a history of representational feminine imagery in order to draw on the historical associations, and subvert them. Rifle-maker offers us a peep-show of the elements unseen.

In their exhibitive debut, on show are porcelain test plates which chronicle Chicago’s studies of china painting in preparation for the Dinner Party. In her key note work, Chicago created the symbolic history of women in Western civilisation and brought the diminished voices of 39 historical and mythological female figures to the table…literally. Using her distinctive multi-disciplinary-multi-media style, Chicago incorporated subject matter into the method by drawing on the traditionally feminine applied arts for the place settings. Along the 49ft triangular table sits embroidered runners, ceramic flatware, embroidered gold napkins, 2000 inscribed tiles and china plates with hand-painted vaginas; the studies for which are on show. Also featured are a series of steel dome sculptures and the eponymous Star Cunts - a set of prismacolour and pastels on paper - that lean towards her earlier minimalist style but still carry the prevailing feminist and feminine forms that characterise her work.

2015 marks quite the year for Chicago; she will simultaneously carry seven shows across Europe which stands as quite the testimony to her continuing influence, impact, relevance and status as ’America’s most important living artist’; this is one dinner party invitation I wouldn’t pass up.

‘Star Cunts & Other Attractions’ : Riflemaker Gallery, 79 Beak Street, London

14th September - 31st December 2015

All images courtesy Riflemaker Gallery

The Guerrilla Girls turned 30; let’s talk about women

With contemporary art having a great focus on social and political issues and agendas, the subject of equality between the sexes in the art world is an important subject under much debate. Many say female artists are not given fair treatment or enough exposure by the art institutions however others argue that there are plenty of female artists and that it is the pay that is widely unequal.  

Many female artists directly address the topic of gender inequality in both art and society as a whole. The anonymous group known as Guerrilla Girls is a massive source of feminist activist inspiration for bringing about racial and gender equality. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the group's founding, we think now is an especially relevant time to look at some women who make a significant contribution to art and creativity.

Michele Abeles’ work is about digital age of images, commodity and how people are reduced to being as insignificant as mundane objects. She combines everyday objects with nude males, using a photography process that flattens the collage of objects and people into a camouflaged Where’s Wally work which slowly reveals more parts of itself as the viewer looks on, literally reducing people to consumable generic items. For the artist, the nudes photographed in her work are as insignificant as the objects surrounding it. Abeles uses copyrighted images found on Google and edits them to create altered scales making the image almost surreal. This work is in response to how images are viewed in the digital age. We see so many layers of visual information, how much do we absorb it and in what way?

The infamous Tracey Emin is most famous for works like Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, a tent with walls of appliquéd names inside and My Bed, an installation of Emin’s unmade bed of used condoms and bloody, dirty underwear. Despite this work being some years ago now, Emin is still very present in contributing to the art world as well as selling her work to high bidders. She is an important role model as a successful and motivated female artist who makes no apologies.

Who Made Your Pants is a campaign running in Southampton, England. Becky John founds the brand and she buys material from big underwear companies at the end of the season to prevent it being wasted. Formed especially to empower women, the co-operative employ female refugees through support agencies to make and sew the pants. However, they also run kind of pop up environments where the customer can chose the fabric and sew their own pair of pants. This kind of work, I believe, is a very effective way of bringing participation based social art into the public sphere and addressing the taboo of making money from conceptual art. 

Ghada Amers work addresses gender and sexuality within art using embroidery and paint to reference abstracted pornographic images of women. She challenges the male dominance and ownership of art. She uses paint abstractly, which she sees as having been made symbolic and dominant in history by men. And so by using this, she is occupying a territory, which has previously been denied to women. Simultaneously, by using uses embroidery, a practice associated with the feminine, to make a further political statement about gender.

Kara Walker uses black paper cut outs to make silhouettes exploring race, gender, sexuality and other social issues. She depicts sex and slavery and deems the viewers discomfort necessary when confronted with this. Her work investigates the dark capabilities of what people can and have done throughout history, and investigates the inability to accept the past.

The argument that feminism is no longer necessary because the sexes are equal is a statement that is wildly inaccurate due to many reasons in western culture alone, without taking into account the many parts of the world in which women aren’t afforded basic human rights. We still a long way to go inside and outside of art until we reach equality but these artists are a part of making that a reality.

Tracey Emin

emininternational.com

Ghada Amers

Who Made Your Pants  

Kara Walker

Guerrilla Girls

Kate Clements: The bride stripped bare by her bachelors

To the uninitiated viewer, looking at Kate Clements’ intricate glasswork, it might be easy to dismiss her as simply another talented decorative artist.

Whilst there is no doubt that she is extremely talented at the physical manipulation of  kiln-fired glass, what does really make Clements’ work stand out?  What makes her a truly great artist is the conversation that her work evokes about the female gender and issues of narcissistic female adornment. Clements’ work goes far beyond obvious feminist debates about woman as object and the power of the female form. Instead, what Clements seeks to uncover is the very psychological reasoning that leads to the cultural construction of feminine identity, and how women’s efforts at fulfilling such ideals can lead simultaneously to feelings of guilt and individual power. Adding to this is her performance work, which examines the ideas of purity and power, using metaphors presented by external objects as a means of examining metaphysical notions of being.

Constructing decorative, non-functional glass headdresses which function as a separation between viewer and ‘wearer’, Clements highlights a persistent desire by women to transcend their physical nature, in the hopes of achieving the socially constructed fantasy of a ‘perfect’ woman. Using such an elaborate and fragile medium adds to the sense of counterfeit perfection suggested by the focus on veils and crowns, key motifs of the beauty queen and the bride. It is this close examination into our cultural constructs and farcical use of adornments that transform Clements’ work into something more than pure decoration, adding layers of meaning that make us examine the very society we live in.

Hi Kate, can you tell us a bit about yourself as an artist? What are your passions? What questions still need answering for you? 

I work primarily with glass but I describe my work as sculpture and installation. I have just completed my masters at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Over the past two years I have explored the ambiguity of fashion—its capacity for imitation and distinction; its juxtaposition of the artificial and the natural; its ability to divide people by keeping some groups together while separating others and accentuating class division. I’ve come to understand the lifecycle of fashion as a process of creative destruction where the “new” replaces the “old,” yet nothing is truly new. 

I am still exploring this and find inspiration in the perspective of critical theorist Georg Simmel whose observations over a hundred years ago remain all too relevant in today’s Gilded Age. “Fashion elevates even the unimportant individual by making them the representative of a totality, the embodiment of a joint spirit. It is particularly characteristic of fashion - because by its very essence it can be a norm, which is never satisfied by everyone...”   Style, as Simmel suggests, both unburdens and conceals the personal, whether in behavior or home furnishings, toning down the personal to “a generality and its law.”  My choice of materials comments on society’s need to conform and maintain distance.

Let’s talk about your chosen medium. What are the benefits and difficulties in working with glass? How did you first discover your interest in kiln-fired glass?

When I was 17 I took a pre-college course in kiln-fired glass at the Kansas City Art Institute, which was primarily mosaic and plate making. The professor saw potential in me and when I started my bachelors there in the fall I trained as his tech and teaching assistant for the course. I continued that job for my four years in undergrad. Because it was only offered as an elective, I learned the fundamentals through instruction but was substantially self-taught.

Working in glass has pros and cons. The glass community is small and very supportive of its artists. Because of the nature of the material, when you are working with it hot you usually need the help of one to four people to make a piece - so the sense of community is very strong.

A con can be the constant struggle of defending the material. The question of why someone creates paintings is asked much less than why someone works with glass. However, the constant question of ‘why glass’ pushes glass artists to address the relevancy of the material in the conceptual nature of the piece as well a technical one. Working within a craft material there is a wide spectrum of what people choose to do with it. It can range from pipes and paperweights to fine art. If I am speaking to someone outside of the glass world and they ask me what I do and I say glass they normally follow up with asking if I can make a pipe for them.

Breaking outside of the glass community can be difficult too. I would love to be showing in galleries that didn’t only represent other glass artists.  Not to get away from other glass artists but so viewers could understand working with glass as fine art and not glass art. This seems to be a line that can be difficult to cross.

What relationships to the female form does your work provoke, and how important is it for you to express these concerns in your work?

I think initially my work was heavily reliant on the female form. As a young woman, I felt the pressures of conforming to some sort of social construct of beauty. At times that has made me feel guilty because I felt a sort of pleasure and power in partaking in that construct.

In recent work I have been addressing how these constructs get translated in different stages of the adaptation of ‘fashions.’ How taste, even ‘bad taste’ can be celebrated in aristocratic society, but once mimicked by a different social sphere it can become kitsch and regarded as ‘aesthetic slumming.’ The concept of fashion and its association with modernity is interplay between individual imitation and differentiation. Fashion, adornment, and ornament all have vicious life cycles; newness is simultaneously associated with demise and death. Though fashion and adornment are closely related to the body, ornament can expand to architecture and environment.

I really love your performance work which I find evocative of the work of Matthew Barney and his use of the body as a vessel for exploring ideas of the human condition. In your piece, Cleaning, the situation transcends the realm of normality and speaks of a higher plane of fantastical reality where juxtaposed items like smashed glass and sweet milk come together to form metaphors about us as human beings, speaking particularly of the paradigms that surround women as having to be ‘pure’ and ‘clean’, expressed powerfully in the denouement of the piece. Tell us a bit about your thoughts behind this and what you wanted to achieve.

This was a very early piece for me that was dealing with my personal experience as a victim of date rape. This marked a turning point for me that was also inspired by a speech by Eve Ensler where she describes the verb prescribed to girls as ‘to please.’ I felt strongly that for a long time I had allowed that verb to describe my interactions with men. There is a rawness and vulnerability in this performance that is mixed with anger.

Who and what influences your work? Are there any artists you recognise as having a big impact on you and your working style?

I just adore Jim Hodges’ work. I think the wide variety of materials and mediums and the way he handles them is truly inspiring and something I look to if I am nervous about working with a new material.  Matthew Barney and Alexander McQueen were huge influences in the glass headdresses and the idea of masquerade and costuming. Other influences have been the palace architecture of Catherine’s Palace in Russia. I love the over-the-topness of the patterning and the idea of excess in a space that blurs the boundaries of public and private, the domestic, and the idea of display.

You have stated that your glass headdress designs function as ‘a separation between viewer and wearer’ but that this distance is only a ‘counterfeit perfection’.  How important is it for you to address ideas of distortion and fantasy in your work?

I enjoy working with things that are recognizable, but nonsensical and fantastical in their execution. I am interested in the perceptions we have in what we think we are displaying, what we actually are displaying, and how we display it. Some materials can transcend their own materiality. The glass can be seen as ice, plastic, or sugar in the headdresses. In newer work it reads as growths or caviar. Regardless of what it appears to be the fact remains that it is extremely fragile and futile. In a newer piece there is a vinyl treated chintz sofa covered in glass beads. The shiny plastic is reminiscent of plastic covered sofas as a means to preserve something nice, but it can also read almost like a piece of porcelain because of the patterning of the fabric.

What is your definition of ‘creativity’? What does it mean to be ‘creative’ in today’s world?

I believe that creativity is driven by never being satisfied with what you’ve accomplished. That there is always something that can be pushed or questioned within a material or challenged conceptually and that ending up somewhere completely different from what you intended is usually a good sign.

If you could go back in time, what advice would you give to yourself ten years ago? What have you learnt as an artist that was unexpected and what advice would you give to others?

The advice I would give myself is to never doubt your interests no matter if conceptually they might sound simplistic.  There is usually something there that can be unfolded into something fairly complex.

Not being intimidated by not being technically trained in a material. Coming from an outside perspective and not knowing the right way to use a material takes away restrictions or inhibitions that might have been taught and allows a certain amount of freedom. 

Kate Clements